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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Ruihuan Li, Xiaoxiao Cao, Zhixian Su, Dan Sun, Yedi Chen, Wei Feng, Zhihui Zhang, Jijun Zhao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 6 | August 2021 | Pages 419-428
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1920784
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Density functional theory calculations were used to study the effects of inherent impurities C, N, and O on the stability and the self-trapping of interstitial He atoms in body-centered-cubic vanadium (V). The most stable site for the He atom nearby C, N, and O is the tetrahedral interstitial site (T-site) rather than the octahedral interstitial site (O-site). The presence of C, N, or O impurities reduces the stability of He in the T-site according to the calculated formation energies. The addition of C and O atoms is beneficial for He self-trapping while the addition of the N atom prevents He self-trapping in vanadium. The stable configurations for Xn-vacancy1 (XnVa1) are C2Va1, N2Va1, and O2Va1. The trapping energies of multiple He atoms captured by XnVa1 are investigated. Our results show that the presence of C, N, and O reduces vacancy trapping of He atoms. Our findings provide further understanding on the behavior of He atoms in vanadium with the influence of C, N, and O.